CONVERSATIONAL AI

Conversational AI refers to the use of messaging apps, speech-based assistants and most prominently, chatbots. Chatbots are seen by some as a bit of a fad. When they were built they were recognized initially as a creative outlet for marketing teams, but they’ve had great impacts on the efficiencies of business-as-usual operations for many companies. Gartner predict that AI bots will power 85% of customer service interactions by 2020 and will drive up to $33 trillion of annual economic growth.

Nascent conversational interfaces also have existed for some time and are only becoming more popular. Devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home Assistant use technologies such as applied machine learning and natural-language processing to enable a voice interface. Sales of the Amazon Echo in its first year were comparable to that of the first iPhone, and with the advent of Sherpa (a predictive virtual assistant) we believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of how conversational AI can transform businesses and their services.

Conversational technology will be empathetic by nature and able to use real-time data analysis to create the sort of context-aware, memory-based conversations we have with each other. That means your customers can be treated on a completely individual basis by a machine that draws on reams of data to enrich the experience. From providing simple facts to answering questions and imparting knowledge, conversational AIs will be able to do everything a human customer-service agent can, but faster and with immediate access to much more information.